Some sense about powerpoint from Nancy Duarte

This is a fascinating read if you are interested in how you can communicate better – a free book from Nancy Duarte, a well known and regarded presentation expert.

Conference presentations these days offer offer the option of two alternate and equally unpalatable outcomes – boredom as slides with 200 words are read out word by word, or seasickness – as aspirational graphics swirl and zoom in front of an enthusiastically compiled Prezi show.

Bad workers always blame their tools of course and PowerPoint has become one of those unfairly maligned pieces of software that is just used badly by most people. In fact, like most tools, use it for the right stuff and it can be very useful – in this particular instance, the end use isn’t a conference presentation at all, but documents that communicate ideas effectively.

In this book, Nancy argues the case for effective communication using the concept of a ‘Slidedoc’ a powerpoint type show somewhere between a meaningless mulch of aspirational pictures and text so dense it can’t be read which seems to encapsulate the range of most of the presentations I have seen today.

This isn’t an infomercial for a piece of software at all, it is a very well thought out process for producing documents that can communicate effectively. It doesn’t matter what tool you use, it is always more important to know what you want to achieve and in this respect, the book does its job very well. Almost 150 pages long, the ‘Slidedoc’ format actually means she gets the points across rapidly and quickly.

[googledocs https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eIp6jz8DM5A7zj1XM6-zhcOqUAVB-hxJxCOcLVqerIk/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000]